


your etymology

by spiritscript



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Etymology, Falling Out of Love, Introspection, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, Suna Rintarou-centric, lots of metaphors, mentioned - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:55:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26970994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiritscript/pseuds/spiritscript
Summary: The word awe used to mean terror, fear. It is believed to be derived from a Greek word that means pain. That sounds about right.words change, so do people and their feelings, and you,  Suna Rintarou, have just come to this understanding
Relationships: Miya Osamu/Suna Rintarou
Comments: 6
Kudos: 33
Collections: SunaOsa, SunaOsa Week 2020





	your etymology

**Author's Note:**

> for SunaOsa week Day Three, Tier One ~~promise~~ /memory (loosely) 
> 
> I asked Twitter and the general consensus was that Suna would fall out of love first - I'm so sorry Samu
> 
> This is very introspective and kinda experimental and kinda my love/hate letter to the English language so I hope you enjoy

The word sad once meant satisfied, being derived from the same Latin root, it was once used to mean that which it is now not. 

Is this a good thing or a bad thing, that this meaning has changed, that time has turned it against itself?

You don’t remember where you heard this, but it was one of those little facts you picked up along the way, somewhere between childhood and adulthood, in that time where everything feels like it’s important. You like to pull it out sometimes, show it off like fool’s gold, like the emperor’s new clothes.

You met him around that time too. In fact, one of your first interactions was around this particular tidbit. The teacher made you stand at the front of the class in a town that was too big and too small - everything was spread out, wide and vast. But there was an end to it, and it held nothing of import - or so you thought. _Maybe you were right._

 _It’s great,_ your mother told you, everyone knows everyone. So small.

But you stood up in a classroom at the age of sixteen at the beginning of highschool, three weeks late, and introduced yourself to faces you didn’t ever want to become recognisable.

Suna Rintarou. I moved here from Tokyo. I like to play volleyball. And a fact I find interesting is - 

Hello Suna-san, the class returned, but welcomes are warm and this place was still too big to hold heat.

You were set beside him and he didn’t move his lazy eyes from the back of the seat in front of him. Whatta weird thing ta know, he mumbled. 

Maybe you were meant to hear, maybe you weren’t. Either way, you did.

The word venom is believed to have once been used to describe love potions, derived from Venus, the Roman goddess of love. That one you found in a book and found interesting in a different way. It first introduced you to the dichotomy of love and death, because life is never the opposite of death. Life is the in between, it’s the purgatory of loving - which is to live life to the fullest - and falling out of it - which is death.

_Fattening you up on a house made of sweets._

Though should you be shocked? Love and venom must both be taken in, ingested, and are both then not something that destroys you from the inside out. Love basically poisoning your system until you are no longer the person you once were - until you look in the mirror at your overly stretched mouth and glowing eyes and you wonder what has possessed you. 

It is a halving of your own self for another. You develop another form of weakness, given away to be held, protected, by someone else. It is a vulnerability that you cannot account for, that may grow diseased and fester and destroy you. 

It is malignant, self destroying, but also an entity separate from you.

 _Love isn’t easy,_ your mother told you, _you cannot help who you fall in love with._

The word chuffed can be used as an antonym of itself. It can mean both to be happy and to be sad. You read this in some silly social media post while waiting for his text, you are feeling antsy, just want it to arrive already, _you want it over already._

You tell yourself that it is only physical distance between you, that you really do miss him, that the ease of adapting to life without him is due to your familiarity with each other; that you didn't need to talk or text or see each other every day because it is so damn easy for you two. That this being away from him is so damn easy because you love him so damn much and that means things are so damn easy because love is easy and you loved him, you did, it was just the distance - the physical distance - that was maybe starting to plague your mind, seep into your system and diffuse through your bloodstream like venom or poison or a potion until your heart stopped beating and you stopped moving because love can’t be manufactured, not like a potion, and it is not the same thing as dying, it is the opposite, it is the opposite and you loved him, love him why would you use the past tense, why when there’s only physical distance between you -

The word ‘chi-wa-ne’ was made up by you at the age of three to describe grapes. 

It became a word you muttered to each other as an inside joke, an assurance, a declaration that you two know each other like no one else ever did or could. It was murmured against skin, spoken in darkness, declared in summer sun, said in tones of joy and excitement and soft admiration. It became his as much as yours.

No one in your family or extended family knows where it came from, or so you’ve been told. You’ve also been told that it took nearly four months for them to figure it out. The revelation occurred after you stamped your feet and demanded chiwane! Your chubby little fist pointing at the bunch of fat round fruit sitting on the kitchen counter in a wooden fruit bowl, and you screamed it again with the determination of a man pleading his innocence on death row. 

You told him about this for the first time as you lounged on his couch in a temporary apartment while you carefully plucked the fattest, firmest grapes from their stems and fed them to him languidly. He was lying in your lap, an unimportant show playing on the shitty TV he bought second hand from someone who knew someone.

He laughed and you stared at the glint in his eyes, the stretch of his mouth. He has a big mouth.

_All the better to eat you with._

As you stared at his face you felt your stomach and heart and chest and so much more of you than there was, fill with affection, adoration, fondness, devotion, awe and every other synonym of love you could ever think of because love was never enough.

_The word awe used to mean terror, fear. It is believed to be derived from a Greek word that means pain. That sounds about right._

You had to turn to other languages to try and find a way to express it - to find a word that could hold so much when your body could not - when nothing could describe it, define it, contain it. It was always just out of reach, it couldn’t be defined, made solid. It slipped through your fingers, and out through the pores of your skin.

You couldn’t describe it because it was too much, that was it wasn’t it?

L’amour, pag-ibig, grá, láska, kärlek, imħabba, αγάπη, любовь, 사랑, प्रेम, حب ... 

Eventually you settled on your own made up gibberish that once meant grapes.

The word flirt used to mean to sneer. You know this one because his brother had told you to stop flirting with him when you turned your nose up at one of his idiotic jokes. You asked him what the fuck he was talking about, and he told you that to flirt had once meant to make a derisive face at someone, that to flirt used to mean to be cruel and therefore, you were flirting with him. 

The two of you had told him that that’s not how it works, and you followed it up by saying something insulting that you don’t really remember because you didn’t mean it anyway and it garnered the necessary reaction.

But your not yet boyfriend had looked at you funny after it, and you wondered what it meant, but were just happy to have his attention. Maybe you were too cruel, you thought. ‘Flirted’ too hard. 

He asked you about it after three long days wherein he seemed quieter, slower, more careful. You knew something was bothering him, yet you waited for him to come to you, until he checked the porridge, the chairs, and the beds and decided which one was just right.

Then you kissed him for the first time.

The word heartache once referred to heartburn, and the word heartburn once meant lust. 

He told you this one, both of them actually. He knows you are fascinated with words, and that these might particularly appeal to you; the way it is not quite a circle, more like unrequited love. Heartache is drawn to heartburn which is drawn to lust which is not heartache. And so heartache must suffer not being the object of its own affections.

_Run, run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me... ___

____

__Doomed to feel that which it now describes._ _

__You used to stare at his picture before you shut your eyes every night with a smile on your face until you didn’t anymore. You told yourself it was because it was no longer necessary because, you told yourself, you knew it so well by now._ _

__You’ve never experienced heartburn, you don’t think you’ve felt heartache, not in the way you’re supposed to have._ _

__You’ve been told your whole life that you’re apathetic, stoic, stolid, impassive, disaffected, indifferent. He made you really think you were none of those things._ _

__You have experienced lust though, and you wonder vaguely if there is a similarity in the three feelings._ _

_They all burn._

__Part of you always felt like you should feel more. Maybe it was all those words from all those different people leaking into your mind, building themselves up as obstacles to you that made you believe you didn’t feel enough, that you didn’t feel in the right way._ _

__Maybe they turned your heart to ice, numbing you until you began to convince yourself that the cold felt warm and so you tried to shed them like the clothes of a delirious hypothermic unaware of your surroundings and your situation. Maybe you attempted to throw them off, peeling and flaying and extracting because maybe it wasn’t cold but heat, _burning_ , and you convinced yourself it was warmth found in that too large town that was always too small. _ _

__But delirium is related to hallucinate and hallucinate used to mean to deceive, and organs inevitably began to shut down anyway, _they were always going to_ , and now you remember, _life isn’t the opposite of death, love is.__ _

__

__

__You think you really did feel that one word. Maybe once. Maybe you named it something different so you could hide._ _

__It’s strange the effect time can have on both the abstract and the concrete. That town is bigger in a different way now, more buildings, more shops, more people. Smaller in another way too, claustrophobic because you don’t think you can go back there with what you know now._ _

_Huff and puff and blow it all down._

__All of these words used to have these different meanings that have become warped and twisted until they are no longer recognisable unless you dig down into them, down and down and down._ _

__And you used to love Miya Osamu._ _

__You bitterly think that maybe you should be satisfied._ _

**Author's Note:**

> I have a writers thread on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ohmiyamy/status/1315764912128393221?s=20) because I tried to pack a lot of meaning into this haha
> 
> Thanks to K ([twitter](https://twitter.com/d_fenestrate) and [ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/d_fenestrate/pseuds/d_fenestrate)) and Grace [twitter](https://twitter.com/gracieK11_22) for making sure this was legible because it certainly was not at the beginning


End file.
